Showing posts with label Promote your blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Promote your blog. Show all posts

Saturday, February 5, 2011

10 Marketing Strategies You Can Implement Today

If you run an online business, blog or website you know you need to be marketing. Maybe you aren’t sure where to start. These ten tips are things you can start implementing right away to grow your business and start getting the word out about your product or service. These tips should be used over and over to continually grow awareness of your blog/product or service. Use them weekly, but they are easy enough that you can start using them today.

1. Interact on related blogs & forums. Simply find blogs and forums that are in the same niche or category as your site and start interacting with people. You can leave comments, offer helpful advice and suggestions or just get to know people.

2. Write and distribute to article directories. Writing an informative article is something you can do today. There are many article directories that will allow you to post your article for free. Not only is this a way to give readers pertinent information but you also get a backlink in your bio or resource box.

3. Guest blog. You may not get a guest blogging spot today, but you can write the blog post and start contacting blog owners to see if they are interested.

4. Create a compelling email signature. You need to do this in your autoresponder signature as well as your personal email signature.

5. Create videos and put on Youtube. Videos are getting more popular every day. You can create several short videos, upload them to Youtube and then share the links with your readers, in your email signature, on Twitter and Facebook. Don’t like seeing yourself on screen? That’s not a problem, you can create Power Point Presentations for the visual and then read from a script so all that’s “seen” of you is your voice.

6. Write a review. You can write reviews on products you’ve tried, ebooks you’ve read, webinars, videos, books you’ve read, affiliate programs. The list is endless on things you can review to help your readers and give you exposure.

7. Tweet to your followers. You don’t have to get on Twitter every single day and bombard your followers with tweets, but you can use Twitter as a strategic source to build your following, set up your personal brand and reach out to others looking for your information.

8. Share your stuff on Facebook. You can set your blogs to post on Facebook through Networked Blogs, you can set up plugins that allow you and others to share your blog posts on social networks. Utitilize these tools for yourself too. Your readers aren’t the only ones who can use them–you can too.

9. Email your list. This one is pretty self explanatory, you can email your list once or twice a week with updates, promotions and other stuff. If you don’t have a list, start a list building campaign and start sending people to your opt-in page.

10. Create a free report. You can write up a report to give away that contains relevant information to your website, product or service. Brand it with your website address in the footer so people know where to go to find more information.

These are all pretty simple methods you can start doing immediately to grow traffic to your blog or website. Do you have any simple solutions not mentioned here that you’d like to share? We’d love to hear from you.

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Monday, January 10, 2011

Big Good Tips From A Little Book And Other Stuff

There’s lots of advice for writers out there today—books on how to write and what to write about, where to submit your work and how to get your literary foot in the front door when you want to be published. Some of the advice you can get is helpful and some is just thinly disguised advertising designed to get you to buy something someone has to sell.

It all comes around full circle in the end to a little book that I got way back in the day when we worked on typewriters and smoked in newsrooms. The Elements of Style by William Struck and E.B. White is a timeless manual for anyone that wants to be a writer because it is clear and concise and it tells you what you need to know about expressing yourself with the written word and leaves out what you don’t need.

And that brings me to other stuff. Has anyone else been following the social  media trending that been going on lately? I just read a study from the business experts at Deloitte that said while a fair percentage of new and forward thinking business is looking into social media, a large percentage still don’t understand what it’s all about and what kind of ROI they can expect on their investment. That makes me wonder if this is a real tool for business to use or just a fad that will slip from prominence eventually.

From a seo standpoint, Facebook or Twitter can drive traffic to your site but you need to be aware of the fact that these social media sites don’t work with keywords and links in the same manner that traditional seo does. Still, if enough people are talking about these sites being the next big thing, then they are bound to be some kind of self fulfilling prophecy in the sense that business will continue to flock to them regardless of their seo effectiveness.

So all that brings things back full circle. Regardless of whether you want to write for the social media or the seo world, you need to know how to write well. The medium doesn’t really matter in the end, it’s the message that counts. So here’s a few more techniques that you can use to make sure that your words attract attention.

Self editing always helps. I’ve just read an article that says you should read aloud when you’re proofing and only use a spell checker as a first screening. Remember too that Less is More. Usually the best way to write something is with the fewest words

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Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Does Your Business Card Leave a Lasting Impression?

What makes a good business card stand out from the crowd? Last week I wrote an article on my blog over about “How to Create a Memorable Business Card“. The point of the article was the let your mind get creative and to come up with a really unique idea for your next business card. After all, once you leave from a conference or networking session and have a bunch of business cards in your pocket from everyone you met, most of the time these are just thrown into a box and never looked at again. Should someone look through their business cards one more time before never seeing them again, wouldn’t you like them to stop on your card and say “wow, that’s really cool. I would like to know more about this person.“. It may not happen all the time, but having a lasting impression is priceless.

Today I went to get a car wash, and when I went inside to pay, I saw they had a huge board for local businesses and people to post their business cards. I looked over the board and most of the cards were very generic and nothing really stood out when look at the board as a whole. Most cards were white, a few had logos and even less had an actual picture of the person it was for.

Having a business card that really stands out and grabs attention would be a perfect example here. I’m sure 50 to 100 people pass this board every day and maybe glance at it for a second, and the chance of having one of these cards stand out from the crowd is slim to none.

What are some ideas you have, or might have seen for making a business card stand out from the crowd?

PrintRunner Business Card Winners Announced

Last month we held a contest for BloggingTips.com readers to win a free set of business cards from PrintRunner.com. The winners have been selected and posted below.

SELECTED WINNERS
———————————–
Mark – theappgeek.com
Kevin – myeatclub.com
Jacque – stanwoodplayschool.com
Benjamin – epiclaunch.com
Kevin – financiallypoor.com

If you were one of the lucky winners, please reply (using the email you entered/left a comment with) with your full contact information and using the contact form on this site. Thanks for entering!

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